musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Allow different styling/formatting of capoed/transposed chord text
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- C++
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Description
Your idea
When a capo fret position is set in Style->Chord symbols, chord text is currently rendered like 'Fm(Dm)'. This feature request is to allow that to be rendered more flexibly.
Problem to be solved
There have been several requests/questions related to this in the past (in forum, examples: https://musescore.org/en/node/67131 https://musescore.org/en/node/276524 ), but I did not find an issue in the github repo to track this. Apologies if I missed it...
One goal would be to allow better control of use of vertical vs. horizontal space (by stacking the chords). It could also allow for techniques to improve readability of the distinction between transposed vs. untransposed chords by using different font or font face.
Prior workarounds have included things like adding an additional transposing instrument, and hiding all of the staff elements except the chord text, then tightening up spacing to get the transposed chords to stack where you want them. This makes the capoed chords no longer be "linked" to the original chords, though, so harder to keep things in sync.
Prior art
No response
Additional context
One possibility might be to expose the rendering of capo-ed chords in the style file: so in addition to renderRoot, renderFunction and renderBase, there could be a renderCapo element. I'm not sure exactly how this might need to interact with :push and :pop to get chords to stack when that is desired, or if it would be possible to change font face or other attributes this way, though.
Other considerations:
- I've seen prior requests for other changes to handling of capos with chord text, e.g., allowing the capo fret position to change at different portions of a score
- Capo handling for tablature staves is handled differently (it does allow changing of capo fret position at different times) and it might be desirable to think of a way to make this more consistent between the two.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at Style->Chord symbols and review the current rendering of capoed chord text, including the displayed Fm(Dm) form. Define what styling and stacking controls are required, then verify that capoed and original chords can be formatted distinctly while remaining linked.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp
- Domain
- design, desktop
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100